When is a boondoggle not a boondoggle?

A lot of people in the advertising business think of a boondoggle the way the Supreme Court thinks of porn –– they can't define it, but they know it when they see it.

I don't think it's that hard to draw the line.

It all comes down to responsibility. If you're doing something you honestly intend to help your client, you're not engaging in boondogglery. If you're doing something for your own personal gratification at the expense of your client, you are.

Take me, for example. I like to travel. So I'm extremely open to finding alternative destinations we can use to produce work for clients. Most of the time, the solutions I find are actually less expensive than the conventional solutions. So if I take a job to Spain and save a client $60,000 over shooting in LA (as I've done), that hardly counts as a boondoggle.

If shooting in Spain costs exactly the same as shooting in LA, money has nothing to do with the decision. If I want to go to Spain and the commercial wouldn't suffer from having been shot there, fine. That doesn't count as a boondoggle, either. As long as the end result is the same.

Where it becomes a judgement call is when shooting in Spain costs more than shooting in LA. And the answer is simple: Do you get more value from shooting there? Not just the "what shows up in the frame" added value, but also the other intangible stuff. Working with a talent pool that isn't overexposed, trying out a new crew, getting to sample the local cuisine. The reality is that for all the positives about shooting elsewhere, there are negatives as well, which I listed pretty extensively in my post on February 26th. I speak Spanish, but I speak English better. So while I can work with a crew in Spain, I'm working harder in order to do so.

On balance, if the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, and I mean mostly to the client because that's who your responsibility is to, then it's not a boondoggle. But if it's a way to make a client pay for a bonus you want to give an employee who's done a really good job this year, it is.

The bottom line is that work is work and vacation is vacation. You can love your work. In fact, you should love your work. But it's still work.

How to keep from becoming an asshole.

So there I am, prepping this job in New Brunswick, and it turns out the client isn’t crazy about the location we’re presenting. The weekend is coming and we can’t really do anything until Tuesday, so I decided to go out and see if I could dig up some alternate locations.

You know what? It was a great use of two days.

Not just because I found a couple of really good locations, and not just because I got a chance to see a lot of the New Brunswick coastline, but because I got a reminder of how hard location scouting is.

I’m going to do a whole blog post on what makes for a good location scout at some point, but suffice it to say here that it’s pretty hard work. And when your assignment is as specific as mine was (an open-concept waterfront home with an uninterrupted horizon behind it, not too close to the houses next door, well-maintained, but not too upscale and by the way, not blue), it gets really hard.

I knew that. But now –– again –– I really appreciate it.

Every once in a while, do one of the jobs on the crew that you haven’t done in a while. Or that you haven’t done at all. It’s a really good way to keep from becoming an asshole.

Sometimes, you have to travel 4,000 miles to get the best dirt from your back yard.

If you're in the film business in Nova Scotia, you either are now or will be soon drinking at the Economy Shoe Shop in Halifax. As I was. Repeatedly. A couple of days last week.

I ran into a bunch of film people I've either worked with, heard of, or vaguely know, and was told more or less the same story by five of them:

Apparently, a huge American client (name withheld) was convinced by its huge American ad agency (name withheld) to pony up for what's technically known as a boondoggle –– wasting a bunch of a client's money in order to indulge your own personal desire. In this case, a business class ticket and five-star accommodations in exotic locations around the world, hobnobbing with famous people, in order to "supervise" a production.

You noticed the quotes, right? I'll get to those in a minute.

One stop on this whirlwind world tour was Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where an Academy Award-nominated movie star (name withheld) was to be filmed entering a class room. Thirty or so local kids were hired as extras for the shot, for which they were meant to be paid $200.

The director decided to tell the kids what to do when said movie star walked into the room. This is called "directing" and union rules are pretty clear that directors can't do that. If directors direct extras, those extras become principals, which means they get paid as principals. But I suppose the production team figured that since these kids were just local Nova Scotia yokels, not seasoned Hollywood actor kids, who would know, right?

(For the record, the movie star appearing in the commercial is a Nova Scotia yokel herself, which was probably one of the arguments the agency mounted to convince the client they needed to take an all-expenses paid trip there, but isn't it funny how the dots aren't connected when it's not convenient to do so?)

Where was I? Oh yeah. Union rules.

These union rules, by the way, are not obscure or particularly arcane. They're almost as basic as "light goes into the front part of the camera." You can't be a working producer or director –– much less a producer or director worthy of flying around the world, spending hundreds of thousands of your client's dollars, and working with an Academy Award-nominated actor –– without knowing them.

Still, nobody "supervising" the production flagged the take as unusable, so the editor cut it into the spot. Which got presented all the way up the corporate ladder and approved and eventually ran globally.

Union rules are pretty clear about this, too. Each time a principal appears in a spot on air, he or she is entitled to collect residuals. But I suppose Nova Scotia is considered such a backwater of civilization by the sophisticated ad guys in LA that they figured nobody there has television.

Imagine their surprise when somebody noticed.

A fan got hit with shit, as they say, and negotiations were suddenly entered into in earnest. The upshot? Each of the extras got a nice little surprise bonus –– a check for $10,000, courtesy of the client. I don't know the media schedule, but I'd be willing to bet that the union was extremely generous in the compromise it reached on behalf of the performers.

Which brings me to the quotes.

Here you have a copywriter, art director, producer, account executive, and probably a couple associate creative directors, account directors, creative directors, and agency heads of production –– because this is, after all, a critical project for this very important client and somebody must be on hand in each of these exotic locations that coincidentally we've always wanted to visit at someone else's expense –– "supervising" this shoot and yet not a single one of them did anything to prevent a $300,000 overage.

The bottom line: Lots of people got really nice vacations, the director (if he's not totally inept) shot enough footage even if the concepts were totally lame to cobble something impressive together to go on his reel, and 30 kids in Nova Scotia are well on their way to having college paid for. The client ought to be furious because the agency didn't just drop the ball, they ran into their own end zone and then stomped on it, but they're so huge and profitable that $300,000 is probably less than their catering bill at the annual shareholders' meeting, so maybe they don't really care.

I think we can take away two lessons here:

1) Just because you convinced somebody to fork over a shit load of money doesn't mean you still don't have to do your job; and

2) Those dumb hicks you're hiring for pennies on the dollar aren't necessarily dumb hicks.

What's cool, though? It sure is easy to find people willing to work as extras in Nova Scotia these days.

Shooting a stage to look like an exterior? You better watch your step.

I don't care how serious the movie is, when I see people chopping through the jungle without once checking to see what they're stepping in, I laugh.

The reason jungle movies are usually shot on stages is because stages are easier. But there's a problem with easier. It doesn't look hard.

Now I'm not saying this because I'm a disciple of Lars von Trier –– as a matter of fact, I happen to think his entire Dogme 95 manifesto is a bunch of crap. (As he seems to, too. Watch any of his films and just count all the times he breaks his own rules, starting with #10.)

But where I agree with him has to do with intention, sort of. His position is that film should be honest; mine is that film should feel honest. To that end, I'm okay with shooting a stage to look like a jungle. Just make it look like a jungle.

All of it.

A smooth floor is a dead giveaway that your actors aren't really outside. And even if you can't see the ground, you can tell by the way they move.

I've chopped through my share of jungles. Trust me, you're stepping in –– or trying to avoid –– a bunch of really interesting things down below knee-level.

Peter Jackson knows this. Now you do, too.

Work against the light.

Provocative headline, huh? You’re probably wondering how I’m going to get out of this one.

Well I’m not. Because I’m not talking about emotional content. I’m talking about spacial relationships.

But before I get into that, a disclaimer: this entire blog is a generalization. If you know what you’re doing, you know that there are as many exceptions to the rule as there are episodes of ‘Star Trek’ in which Spock showed emotion.

Okay, on with the blog.

I can sum up the most important rules of cinematography in three words: Backlight, backlight, backlight.

Backlight, in case you’re not familiar with the term, means that the light is coming from behind your subject toward the camera. I’m talking about the implied source of all the light in the environment. When you’re outside, it’s the sun. Or moon. When you’re inside, it’s a window. Or a lamp. There can be more than one source of light, but generally, thinking of light in terms of a single source makes your film prettier and your life easier.

Two things you need to know about light: It travels in a straight direction and it bounces off of stuff. The reason those things are important is because light hitting an object will cause it to cast a shadow. And since one of the fundamental conceits of film is its voyeuristic nature, it’s a lot better to see the shadow of an actor than the shadow of a camera.

As for bouncing off of stuff, that’s what gives you ambience. Ambient light fills the shadows so you can see actors’ faces even if the source of the light is behind them.

One of the neat things you get with backlight is separation. Foreground objects don’t blend into the background as much as they do with front light. One of the things you lose is saturation. I like saturation, but I like separation more.

And I really hate seeing my own shadow in the shot.

When you’re inside, the direction of the light won’t change but its quality can. That’s why you’ll see DPs putting black tents over perfectly good windows, then blasting light in from under them. When you’re outside, both the quality and the direction of the light changes because Mr. Sun moves across the sky.

You need to plot out your day so that the direction you’re shooting in is generally toward the sun. Where I live, that means you turn to the right over the course of the day. After a while it becomes second nature, which can be a problem. The first time I shot in the southern hemisphere, I forgot that the sun goes the other way in the sky there. I worked out the order of the day in front of the entire crew under the presumption that we would turn to the right. And nobody said a word.

It was only after I noticed the DP gnashing his teeth that I took him aside and asked what was wrong. We’d never worked together, and he didn’t know whether I was simply being an idiot or had my own particular style that he was going to have to live with.

Turns out, to his relief, I was just being an idiot. And once I realized it, I rescheduled the day so that it made more sense.

If I’d been an asshole--as lots of directors feel the need to be--I would have reamed him for questioning my approach and stuck by the order that I’d established. But the way I see it, I lost less authority by admitting I’d made a mistake than I would have if I’d stuck to an idiotic path, pretending that I knew what I was doing.

Work against the light. Work with the DP. That’s not too hard, is it?